After Britain was reportedly dismissed as a “small island” by a Russian official last week, David Cameron took the steering wheel and sped off to compose his response. For security reasons, prime ministers are not normally supposed to drive. But at the G20 summit in St Petersburg, there were electric cars to ferry the participants from one location to another. Cameron decided to commandeer one such buggy, and give his officials, Craig Oliver, Liz Sugg and Helen Bower, a lift to the press conference.
Occasionally hair-raising as Cameron-Cabs turned out to be, the team was calm enough to help the driver draw up his inventory of British accomplishments, which the PM duly rattled off to the media when they arrived – ending, correctly, with a quip: “If I start talking about this 'blessed plot, this sceptred isle, this England’, I might have to put it to music, so I think I’ll leave it there.” His mini-speech is indeed going viral, with a variety of added soundtracks. This is modern political rhetoric in action.
Much less snappy was the 25-minute anti-war speech that President Kirchner of Argentina delivered over dinner, provoking Angela Merkel and Cameron to roll their eyes at one another. In the end, the British Prime Minister removed his translation earpiece – poor summit etiquette, no doubt, but understandable in the circumstances. Cameron and President Obama had an informal chat before dinner at the hotel and compared notes. This G20 gathering was clearly going to entrench global divisions over Syria, as President Putin had doubtless hoped it would. The eyes of the world now turn to Congress, where Obama will seek the backing that eluded Cameron.
On Tuesday, meanwhile, Ed Miliband will try to salvage what he can from the wreckage of the Falkirk selection fiasco as he addresses the TUC in Bournemouth. The political class is about to turn inward for the party conference season and away from the seemingly intractable dilemmas of the Middle East. It is one of mankind’s oldest reflexes, chillingly recorded in Robert Frost’s description in “Out, Out––” of the onlookers who see the boy killed by the buzz saw: “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs.”
Little noticed so far, Wednesday marks the 12th anniversary of 9/11. On that sense-shattering day in 2001, it seemed that nothing would ever be the same again, that we would never get over it. The destruction of the Twin Towers forced us to confront a geopolitical landscape shaped by interconnected terror groups, rogue states, and the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Yet we underrated our collective capacity to forget, to resume bad habits, to park, postpone and otherwise ignore new and difficult questions. The process of selective amnesia was encouraged by the terrible errors made in the first fumbling years after the attacks: the misuse of intelligence, the lamentable failure to plan Iraq’s future after Saddam, the shame of Abu Ghraib, the insult to language that was “enhanced interrogation”, the horrors of “extraordinary rendition”. All these failures, shameful in themselves, were the mark of a strategy in its infancy, of people in authority not knowing quite what to do, how to do it or where the limits lay. The errors that were made in the years after 9/11 mapped perfectly on to a growing popular trend – what Alastair Campbell famously called “this huge stuff about trust” – and the growing contempt for hierarchy given technological teeth by the digital revolution. The spotlight turned decisively back on to home terrain.
The financial crash assisted the process of forgetting. Suddenly, the main global task was not to “drain the swamp” of terrorists, and to deal – cack-handedly, in Iraq – with regimes that had used, acquired or wanted to acquire WMD, but to ensure that the financial system did not collapse.
Suddenly, there was a powerful fiscal imperative averting the West’s focus from the new global landscape on to which 9/11 blasted a fiery light. That landscape was, in any case, changing all the time: witness the wave of uprisings known collectively as the “Arab Spring” – an astonishing release of human energy, the full and complex implications of which are only gradually revealing themselves. These revolutions posed a question that the more ideologically hidebound neo-conservatives had never convincingly answered. What if it is true that democracy is indeed the natural political arrangement for human beings, rather than a Western cultural peculiarity, but the newly liberated nations elect jihadi parties that have more in common with Osama bin Laden than Barack Hussein Obama? What happens when theocrats win elections? The conundrum is posed not only by the Muslim Brotherhood. Think, too, of Hizbollah’s banners with the mushroom cloud, and of the overwhelming public support in Iran for the regime’s nuclear ambitions. These are nightmarish quandaries that cannot be wished away.
The trouble is that you cannot have globalisation à la carte. That is the true lesson of 9/11. Many Conservatives believe that the world is simply a big marketplace and that the only international issues that matter are those connected to trade barriers, the flow of capital and the correct limits upon labour mobility. But the collapse of the Twin Towers – and, after that, Bali (2002 and 2005), Madrid, London, Glasgow, Mumbai, and many other horrors – showed that the pathologies of a globalised world respect no borders and no limits. Even if you ignore the Islamist fanatics, they will attack you; especially if you do, in fact – the 9/11 attacks reflected al-Qaeda’s perception that the West had grown sluggish and weak.
The great question of the post-9/11 age is: how do we – and indeed can we – ensure that the new polities in the regions that have spawned Islamist terror are stable, democratic and denied WMD? This is why Syria is more than an opportunity to make amends for Iraq, or a dress rehearsal for Iran. It is supremely important in and of itself. Whether we like it or not, the process will be messy, protracted and complex. At present, our inaction is making the problem worse. By taking so long to respond to the Ghouta chemical-weapons atrocity of August 21, we are signalling to Assad and his counterparts that bureaucracy dressed up as democracy remains the West’s most resilient cultural feature. By failing to arm the moderates – though William Hague certainly tried – we run the risk that extremist groups such as Jabhat al-Nusra, which is officially affiliated with al-Qaeda, will be the ultimate beneficiaries of the civil war in Syria, whatever the West does.
Israeli intercepts of secret Hamas documents show that such groups think in time frames of 50 to 100 years, measuring their objectives in generations. Our mayfly culture prefers its history in 140 characters. But that is self-deception, the parent of self-harm. The Syrian crisis is a reminder of the complexity of the world laid bare on that cruel Manhattan morning 12 years ago. We are trying to fight the battles of the 21st century with the structures, ideas and methods of the 20th. On Wednesday, the best way of honouring the dead will be to accept afresh that the long haul has only just begun.
Matthew d'Ancona is the award-winning political columnist for The Sunday Telegraph, a position he has held since 1996.